Memories of Hugh E. Huxley (1924–2013)

The field of structural biology lost a giant on July 25, 2013, when Hugh E. Huxley passed away at age 89. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus of biology at Brandeis University. But for much of his career, he was at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Huxley joined the American Society for Cell Biology in 1982. In 1983, along with Joseph Gall, he won the prestigious E. B. Wilson Medal, the highest honor awarded by the society. My first meeting with Hugh Huxley was in January 1969. When I arrived at the LMB to begin a postdoctoral fellowship with Hugh, I met Linda Amos in the front entrance hall. After introducing myself, I asked Linda where I might find Hugh Huxley. She replied that I was most likely to find him in the basement at the rotating anode for collecting low-angle, x-ray diffraction data on muscle fibers. I was to look for “an elegant man with white hair.” Her description was perfect, and Hugh was easy to find. He welcomed me to Cambridge, and after a brief discussion, we agreed to meet the next day. Thus began a memorable two years of work in Hugh’s laboratory. My training in structural biology at the LMB was pivotal for what my laboratory was able to accomplish over the next four decades. Huxley’s career represents intense training in physics. In 1941, he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study physics. After his first two years, his studies were interrupted by service in the Royal Air Force as a radar officer from 1943 to 1947. During that time, he worked on the development of improved airborne radar devices, and he found his passion in developing mechanical and electrical devices. He was to continue in that path for his entire career. Huxley then returned to Cambridge to finish his physics studies, and, in 1948, he joined an extraordinary adventure in Cambridge by becoming the first PhD student of a newly formed small MRC unit founded by Max Perutz and John Kendrew, housed in a temporary hut outside the Cavendish in Cambridge and named the “Laboratory of Molecular Biology.” As Kendrew’s PhD student, Huxley began his lifelong interest in exploring the structural basis of muscle contraction. For his PhD thesis, he used low-angle, x-ray scattering of live muscle fibers to reveal a fascinating pattern of reflections in resting (precontraction) versus “rigor” (postcontraction) muscle. His PhD thesis, completed in 1952, was entitled “Investigations in Biological Structures by X-Ray Methods. The Structure of Muscle” (Huxley, 1952). To put Huxley’s work in perspective: Albert Szent-Györgyi and his colleagues had shown in the 1940s that both actin and myosin were needed to give artificial fibers that would contract in ATP, and the general conclusion at that time was that the contractile apparatus in the muscle involved composite filaments of colloidal actomyosin that underwent some form of ATP-dependent phase transition. An